Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 98 posts

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#51

Post by csallen »

nobrains wrote: post #41

I would argue that the test was irrational: "(A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five percent of the subjects chose B". Many people could have assumed that being in set (B) automatically means set (A) = NOT set (B). Set (B) being more precisely defined, it can easily be assumed that anyone in set (B) is not in set (A). The participants can easily ass…

So what you're saying is the participants went with their intuitive feeling about how the question might be structured as opposed to applying deliberate and effortful analysis/reasoning to understand what was being asked.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#53

Post by Artoemius »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
charlieflowers wrote: post #9

I have known many clearly intelligent people who held irrational opinions quite strongly. For example, huge believers in specific, concrete stock market predictions based on some fibonacci sequence nonsense, to the point of actively loosing six figures through multiple failed predictions over a decade+ and still believing. So clearly, they're distinct. But the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the stro…

> the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the strongest indicator. It seems more like a parlor trick that relies on our "system 1" brain short circuiting before our "system 2" kicks in. The question about the bank teller is a parlor trick that exploits normal language processing, specifically the Gricean Maxim of Relevance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of... ). The maxim spe…

> if somebody takes the trouble to point something out to you (say, that someone you've never met used to be a very politically-active left-winger), what they pointed out must be relevant to the conversation.

Even if the brain believes that all things that are pointed out are relevant, that still doesn't explain this problem with bad communication.

There are two statements, P and Q, and you have a question of what's more probable: statement P or the conjunction P&Q. The experimenter (communicating badly) makes you believe that Q has a very high probability. However, it is still logically impossible for P&Q to be more probable than P.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#54

Post by Artoemius »

nazgul17 wrote: post #50
thaumasiotes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the strongest indicator. It seems more like a parlor trick that relies on our "system 1" brain short circuiting before our "system 2" kicks in. The question about the bank teller is a parlor trick that exploits normal language processing, specifically the Gricean Maxim of Relevance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of... ). The maxim spe…

This. I think the Linda problem is all based on the fact that when you tell people "which is more likely true ?" they hear "which one is more likely to be the exact description of reality?" Is not irrationality, just miscommunication.

The problem is that even if people hear it like this, P is still a more likely exact description of reality than P&Q.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#55

Post by jomamaxx »

paulddraper wrote: post #12
dmfdmf wrote: post #11

> people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason. I think these types of article have a too-narrow definition of rationality. I think that emotions, feelings and intuition are subconscious processes but still part of the faculty of reason. The mistake is to think that rationality = conscious-logical-deduction but anyone who has solved some complex problem knows the experience of working on a prob…

Are you suggesting that reason include intuition? I don't believe that would ever be a helpful definition of the word. --- Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious. Of course, they're related: reason can train intuition, and intuition can catalyze reason. But I disagree that a conversational distinction is inappropriate.

"Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious."

Conscious or not, it can still be reason.

'Hunger' , 'fear', 'lust', 'anger' are all part of the reasonable human calculation.

If you set your mind to just 'conscious' decisions, we'd have been dead a long time ago.

Consider autonomous functions: are you 'reasoning' your heart rate and breathing right now?

And yet, somewhere, somehow, you're 'deciding' to keep your heart at a certain rate while it's warm, and another when you are in need of more oxygen, and another when it's cold.

So autonomous functions are perfectly reasonable.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#56

Post by thaumasiotes »

Artoemius wrote: post #53
thaumasiotes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the strongest indicator. It seems more like a parlor trick that relies on our "system 1" brain short circuiting before our "system 2" kicks in. The question about the bank teller is a parlor trick that exploits normal language processing, specifically the Gricean Maxim of Relevance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of... ). The maxim spe…

> if somebody takes the trouble to point something out to you (say, that someone you've never met used to be a very politically-active left-winger), what they pointed out must be relevant to the conversation. Even if the brain believes that all things that are pointed out are relevant, that still doesn't explain this problem with bad communication. There are two statements, P and Q, and you have a question of what's…

I relate the following discussion from memory:

"Long ago", a psychologist did the following experiment on children of different ages: he'd lay out one line of M&Ms with broadly uniform spacing, and another line, longer, with the same spacing, and ask the child "which line has more M&Ms?" After they correctly indicated that the longer line had more M&Ms, he'd adjust the spacing between the M&Ms in the shorter line such that it was now longer. Then he'd ask again, "which line has more M&Ms?" He found that, below a certain age (I hope this finding was approximate), children would indicate the longer (and sparser) line as now having more M&Ms, and above the threshold age they would point to the correct, denser line.

His published papers were viewed as establishing a major threshold in child development, where children started to be capable of assessing reality independently. "Not so long ago", someone decided to replicate this landmark finding.

The twist was, in the replication, instead of asking the children "which line has more M&Ms now?", they said "OK, now you can take one of the lines and eat all of the M&Ms that were in it".

And the threshold effect disappeared completely. Children of all ages chose the line with numerically more M&Ms, regardless of linear extent.

When the problem is your experimental design, you're not warranted in drawing conclusions. You've already demonstrated that you're not qualified to speculate on them.

> that still doesn't explain this problem with bad communication.

> There are two statements, P and Q, and you have a question of what's more probable: statement P or the conjunction P&Q. The experimenter (communicating badly) makes you believe that Q has a very high probability. However, it is still logically impossible for P&Q to be more probable than P.

Your objection only makes sense if (1) human-to-human communication consists of messages that precisely specify their intended meaning, and (2) people believe that (1) is true. (1) and (2) are both false.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#57

Post by ordu »

whybroke wrote: post #14
dmfdmf wrote: post #11

> people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason. I think these types of article have a too-narrow definition of rationality. I think that emotions, feelings and intuition are subconscious processes but still part of the faculty of reason. The mistake is to think that rationality = conscious-logical-deduction but anyone who has solved some complex problem knows the experience of working on a prob…

How would you go about showing that emotions, feelings and intuition produce good results without proving that very idea rationally? While intuition may be useful to get good results (perhaps it is the subconscious quickly applying some pattern that has worked in the past) there's no way to know a particular use of intuition worked unless you go back later and rationally analyze the results. And more importantly, the…

> And more importantly, there's no reason to believe intuition works...

Yes, there is. Humans are alive, they survived the evolution and they used intuition much more frequently then rationality. Logic was invented by greeks less then 3k years ago and before there was no way for rationality to exist. Intuiton does works in most cases. It is the apparent fact.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#58

Post by cJ0th »

> Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

I don't see how either guess is generally less likely then the other one. I'd say it depends rather on your mental framework whether you choose A or B. Therefore, I'd argue a frequentist would rather choose answer A whereas a Bayesian would be inclined to choose answer B.

The difference between rationality and intelligence imo lies in how you deal with unknown Unknowns. A person who is merely rational wouldn't consider them whereas a intelligent person would have the ability to deal with them in some way.

Take the infamous Westbro family for example. In Louis Theroux's movie they came across as rational human beings assuming that their world view is correct. Indeed they appeared to have a happy family life. If everyone would (want to) follow their rules than the world would probably work. They, however, fail to realize that they haven't found a magic bullet and that other people are able to lead equally fulfilling lifes. Their attempts of "saving" these people are bound to be a futile waste of time and thus I wouldn't consider them as intelligent.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#59

Post by mehwoot »

cJ0th wrote: post #58

> Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. I don't see how either guess is generally less likely then the other one. I'd say it depends rather on your mental framework whether you choose A or B. Therefore, I'd argue a frequentist would rather choose answer A whereas a Bayesian would be inclined to choose answ…

I don't see how either guess is generally less likely then the other one.

How could A possibly be less likely than B?? The occurrences of B are a strict subset of A, there is no possible way B could happen more frequently.

Re: The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence

#60

Post by cJ0th »

mehwoot wrote: post #59
cJ0th wrote: post #58

> Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. I don't see how either guess is generally less likely then the other one. I'd say it depends rather on your mental framework whether you choose A or B. Therefore, I'd argue a frequentist would rather choose answer A whereas a Bayesian would be inclined to choose answ…

I don't see how either guess is generally less likely then the other one. How could A possibly be less likely than B?? The occurrences of B are a strict subset of A, there is no possible way B could happen more frequently.

Maybe I am a bit confused but I just meant to imply that A and B could be considered equally probable if you're a Bayesian who has absolute confidence that she's the kind of person who is active in the feminist movement.
Post reply on HN